A number of systems and accounting methods have been developed to evaluate inventory of retail outlets or stores. Inventory can be a primary cost of a retail enterprise and it can be important to evaluate cost of on-hand inventory for purposes of inventory management.
Traditional retail inventory evaluation methods include comparing items received by a store to items sold by the store. The difference between the items received by the store and items sold by the store can give an indication of the number of items in inventory. Additionally, physical inventory may be taken, for example, by a store employee identifying inventory items. In this instance, the employee takes an accounting of items in inventory to provide an indication of inventory numbers. With the item costs, an inventory cost can be associated with the inventory calculated or identified.
A method for tracking the location or identity of items in inventory is through use of Universal Product Code technology, or barcode technology, which uses a linear array of elements that are either printed directly on an object or on labels that are affixed to the object. These bar code elements typically comprise bars and spaces, with bars of varying widths representing strings of binary ones and spaces of varying widths representing strings of binary zeros. Bar codes can be detectable optically using devices such as scanning laser beams or handheld wands, or they can be implemented in magnetic media. The readers and scanning systems electro-optically decode the symbol to multiple alpha-numerical characters that are intended to be descriptive of the article or some characteristic thereof. Such characters are typically represented in digital form as an input to a data processing system for applications in point-of-sale processing and inventory control.